My landscape portrayed in my maps consists of a river and its bank, surrounded by a town and its roads. The main feature expressed is that of the sudden rise from the river bank to the more level surface that contains the town. However, a clear cut in the topography is visible where the main road cuts through the land.
In the first map, using slope shading and hypsometric tint, the topography was able to be well conveyed with an overlay of the flow lines and roads. The slope shading was particularly useful in depicting the sudden rise from the river bank. I encountered a problem with having the shaded relief have much significance in portraying the topography as the main feature is the river, whilst the rest is mostly flat, making shaded relief rather ineffectual. Having the overlay of semi-transparent layers presented issues in color representation as at first the lighter part of the brown hypsometric tint appeared as an odd green through the grayscale slope shading, with some alteration it looked less unappealing, while still portraying the topography.
The contours in map 2 were simple to create but perfecting how to convey them was difficult. Choosing interval, color, and width were all issues I encountered. I finally settled on an interval that gave enough detail while not being overcrowded as the relief is relatively level. The colors were distinct and appealing with a 1pt dark green line for index contours and a 0.5pt lighter green line for the rest of them. Symbology for the lines was difficult as the contrasts were different when viewing in the symbology tab, the different view modes, and as the exported image. As a result, I had to keep going back and changing it and checking how the image turned out.
Then in map 3, due to the topography being so flat, I had to raise the altitude angle in order to get zero values of shadowing to create the Tanaka contours. The color choice for the hypsometric tint with the Tanaka contours was also important in choosing a color scheme that complemented the white and black shadowed contours. I decided on blue for low, as cool colors are seen as distant, while also being applicable to the low point being the river. Then orange for higher levels, as warm colors are perceived as closer. Yet, this could be deceiving to the map reader as it may appear that lower levels are cooler temperatures and higher ones are warmer, which is not the intention of the symbology.
For map 4, I had to really exaggerate the relief, with a number of 5, as the majority was so flat. It was also difficult to choose an angle for the three-dimensional scene to be presented as an image. This is because the detail of the image distracts from the relief representation in the warped raster layer.
Overall, I think map 1 gave the best impression of the topography, and the second and third ones (contours) gave the best visual identification of the levels. The Tanaka contours do this slightly better than the regular contours as the shadowing makes it appear more 3D, yet the regular contours have a more numerical reference with the index contours. Ideally, the last map, map 4, would have surpassed all of them, yet it is not so easily captured in a single image of the scene. It has detail and conveys the shape to the viewer very well when viewed in Arc Scene, where motion manipulation adds to the stimuli of perceiving the third dimension. Map 2 was the worst at showing that the topography was concerned with the relief surrounding a river, while all the others clearly represented the river as a focal feature.